I finally finished Final Fantasy XV… many, many months after I started playing it. It’s certainly a game.

👍 I very much enjoyed playing FFXV. The core gameplay loop was solid and dare I say addictive at times. Exploring, Quests, Battles, Levelling up. All good. But I did have some gripes about certain aspects of the game.

The Technical Side

This is a very resource demanding game. Kudos to the developers for letting me fine tune it down to the point I could play it on a laptop for a decent amount of time without it overheating. Alas, it wasn’t a very smooth experience, so I stopped playing it about half way through to wait until I built a proper PC.

Once I did start playing on a proper game-capable computer it was so much better. The game fared well at being able to integrate me back in after months of not playing it. But I was quite annoyed when switching to my second device and finding that none of my pictures had synced across properly – especially at the end where it asks you to pick “the one” photo that you like most. 😠

I did notice that at some points the game started to stutter, but it only crashed on me once, and the autosave works pretty well for that.

I was playing the steam version and this has modding support. All games should allow for modding, it’s fun. Even if it is so you can just ride around on giant fish.

The Art

I’ve no idea who was in charge of the art direction on FFXV, probably multiple people, they have done an excellent job. The world is built in a fascinating way blending modern life and fantasy landscapes. It makes it a joy to just roam around exploring the place and taking pictures. I love how varied everything is: Areas mirroring the american mid-west to the streets of Venice.

This is one of those games that I’d very much like to use with a VR headset and an exercise bike and just cycle around. Alas, I’ll have to wait longer for such a mash-up of technology.

The Story

The main characters are great. I was not expecting such a level of bro going into this, but it works very well, and by the end I actually care what happens to the characters. It’s rare that I can really emphasise with a game’s characters. The iffy dialogue, including Chef Ignis’ random outbursts of “I’ve come up with a new recipeh!”, are pretty funny.

As to why the characters are doing the things they do, I’m less interested. Playing through it, even despite the gap in my play-through, I wasn’t exactly sure of why anything was happening the way it was. I got the general gist of it – Kingdom in turmoil due to various malefactors, but I needed to read up a bit on some of the finer points outside the game.

The Gameplay

The characters, both the Main ones and the NPCs are great. There’s good mix of all kinds, each distinct enough that the game (at least as I felt it) avoids fetch quest hell. Except for the fools that seem to keep breaking down on roads. Car repair kits aren’t very expensive, just carry one around with you. 😤

For battles, I like the system that they have built up, there’s a very wide range of customisation you can take for the characters and a wide array of different battling styles to work with. However, I think the game suffered somewhat from this: Even after playing all the way through there are some battle mechanics, such as armiger chains and link strikes (I’m sure there are others) that I still have no clue how to work. There are QTEs in this game, mostly inside battles, and they’re not as annoying as I’ve seen in other games.

Recommended

This is a game that I’d recommend to Action-RPG fans. It is a timesink, the story kind of confused me, it was fun to play.